Word down here has it that this stuff ran all the way to the Dauphin Island Bridge. When the boat went thru it there was no water trail behind the boat, just this brown crap. It was thick and stuck to the boat.

Excerpt:
Back at Pass Christian Harbor, her team reported the Carolina Skiffs actively spraying dispersants. She was told by the contracting company, Parson's, that managed their VOO team, to bring in her photographs.

Her entry from the next day, August 9, reads:

"I took the pictures, 8x10's to Parson's. A short time later, my husband called and said the Coast Guard wanted me to make a disc of the pictures. I took the disc and turned it over to the Coast Guard. I was told, in the presence of others, that the incident had been investigated and the boats in question had been located at the Henderson Point site. He said that these boats were in the VOO program as skimmer boats, but it had not yet been verified. He said that he had questioned them about spraying something on the water. They told him that if I had seen them spraying anything, they were probably just rinsing out their tanks. He also asked me, 'Don't you think if they were spraying dispersants, they would be wearing respirators?' I told him, 'You would think so, but nothing surprises me around here anymore.' We basically left after that. I knew all they had really wanted was to see exactly what I had gotten pictures of. There is of course the question, 'Why would a skimmer boat need to rinse out his tanks?' If he had been skimming oil, why dump it back over? If he hadn't been skimming oil, what was he rinsing out? I know what I saw and I know how I felt afterwards. I also know that in one of the pictures I took, you can see a helicopter over those boats. BP has spotters looking for oil. Could it be he was telling them where to 'Touch Up' before they called it a day? One thing I did learn from Coast Guard guy that day, evidently these so-called skimmer boats, also have the ability to spray!"

Excerpt:
Back at Pass Christian Harbor, her team reported the Carolina Skiffs actively spraying dispersants. She was told by the contracting company, Parson's, that managed their VOO team, to bring in her photographs.

Her entry from the next day, August 9, reads:

"I took the pictures, 8x10's to Parson's. A short time later, my husband called and said the Coast Guard wanted me to make a disc of the pictures. I took the disc and turned it over to the Coast Guard. I was told, in the presence of others, that the incident had been investigated and the boats in question had been located at the Henderson Point site. He said that these boats were in the VOO program as skimmer boats, but it had not yet been verified. He said that he had questioned them about spraying something on the water. They told him that if I had seen them spraying anything, they were probably just rinsing out their tanks. He also asked me, 'Don't you think if they were spraying dispersants, they would be wearing respirators?' I told him, 'You would think so, but nothing surprises me around here anymore.' We basically left after that. I knew all they had really wanted was to see exactly what I had gotten pictures of. There is of course the question, 'Why would a skimmer boat need to rinse out his tanks?' If he had been skimming oil, why dump it back over? If he hadn't been skimming oil, what was he rinsing out? I know what I saw and I know how I felt afterwards. I also know that in one of the pictures I took, you can see a helicopter over those boats. BP has spotters looking for oil. Could it be he was telling them where to 'Touch Up' before they called it a day? One thing I did learn from Coast Guard guy that day, evidently these so-called skimmer boats, also have the ability to spray!"

Gulf Shrimp Testing: Is a Dozen Samples in 5000 Square Miles Enough to Reassure You?

Today, NOAA reopened 5,130 square miles of Gulf waters to shrimping and fishing. I took a look at the data on which NOAA based their decision and was surprised to find that their data included only 12 samples of shrimp, consisting of a grand total of 73 individual shrimp, caught from an area about the size of the State of Connecticut.

Does that reassure you that they've really found whatever contamination might be out there?

DMR staff took boat tours Wednesday and Thursday to allow oystermen, dealers and processors to preview the condition of the oyster reefs off the Pass Christian harbor prior to the start of the season. Dozens of empty oyster shells dredged up Wednesday had fishermen concerned about the fate of the season.

Hazen’s interpretation has its skeptics. “Most of the science associated with this spill has been oversimplified,” says John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer at Texas A&M University in College Station. In a good-faith effort to make sense of what’s going on, many researchers look to offer interpretations based on too few data, he charges.

For instance, he says, “what Hazen was measuring was a component of the entire hydrocarbon matrix,” which is a complex mix of literally thousands of different molecules. Although the few molecules described in the new paper in Science may well have degraded within weeks, Kessler says, “there are others that have much longer half-lives — on the order of years, sometimes even decades.”